United Poultry Concerns opposes the EGG PRODUCTS
INSPECTION ACT AMENDMENTS OF 2013. We oppose legislation that benefits egg
producers and legally condemns hens to living in cages. With Congress set to
consider the Farm Bill shortly, please notify your U.S. Senators and
Representatives that you oppose the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments.
Urge them to oppose this legislation and briefly and clearly explain your
reason.

Facts: The Egg Bill would legalize and legitimize cages for hens
What is an enriched cage?
Helping Hens or Benefiting Their Abusers?
What Should I Do?

In
“Agreement Raises Flags for Egg-Laying Hens” published in 2012, United
Poultry Concerns reviewed the effort by animal advocates to ban cages for
egg-laying hens in Europe and the United States. In 2011, a pact between The
Humane Society of the United States and United Egg Producers frustrated this
effort, which also failed in the European Union when a law went into effect
January 1, 2012 banning conventional barren battery cages while legalizing
“enriched” or “furnished” battery cage systems for hens in the EU.

Following suit, the alliance between HSUS and UEP led to legislation
before Congress in 2012. The Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2012
(The “Egg Bill”) sought to legalize cages for egg-laying hens, prevent
voters from initiating ballots to ban cages in their own state, and prohibit
states from passing stronger welfare laws than those set in the Egg Bill.

Last year’s bills failed but are once again before Congress. Under the
terms of the 2013 Egg Bill sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California
and Rep. Curt Schrader of Oregon, barren battery cages would be phased out
over a 20-year period and replaced by “enriched” cages as the dominant
housing system for hens in the United States.

The Egg Bill would legalize and legitimize cages for hens

Since cages are the cheapest way to mass-produce billions of eggs for
consumers, the majority of the 280 million hens in U.S. facilities will
continue to be caged in long windowless buildings just as they are now,
under the proposed law.

This year’s Egg Bill is even worse than last year’s: one of the worst
exemptions allows the toxic excretory ammonia levels of 25 parts per million
in confined-hen buildings to reach even higher levels of toxicity to
accommodate egg industry “emergencies” of unspecified duration. The
toxic ammonia the Egg Bill permits constitutes animal cruelty even without
cages.

Basically it’s still a battery cage, the birds living
behind bars on metal grid flooring, the cages stacked up in tiers, many
thousands of hens to a building. Compared to the old-style cage, there’s
mandatory additional floor space per hen measuring roughly the size of a
postcard, bringing the entire minimum space per hen to 750 square
centimeters (116 square inches), little more than a sheet of paper.

The cages must include a perch, a “nest” box and a scratch pad. The term
“nest box” sounds comforting, Clare says. “But in the enriched cage context
it is simply a curtained area, behind which the hen finds the same sloping
cage floor, the metal grid now covered in matting of some kind. Not a wisp
of straw, no soft material with which to arrange her nest. Some of the
enriched colony cages I saw held up to 60 hens. Gleaming metal cages
stretched away into the distance, and there was that familiar unending
clamor of frustrated hens’ voices.”

Helping Hens or Benefiting Their Abusers?

Under the terms of the Egg Bill, the majority of hens will remain in
cages. They will be locked into a federal law administered by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture which doesn’t even enforce the 55-year-old “Humane
Slaughter Act,” from which birds are excluded.

At most, brown hens, being slightly larger than the white hens who
represent the majority of egg-laying hens in the United States, may within
20 years get a maximum of 144 square inches apiece, or one square foot of
living space per hen. The white hens will max out at 124 square inches per
hen, well below a square foot, even though a hen needs a minimum 1.5 square
foot, or 216 square inches, merely to engage in minimal “normal behavior.”

Whether the Egg Bill would ban starvation molting of hens is a question.
The ammonia cave-in and the cage cave-in show how capitulation to egg
industry economics and “emergencies” will likely influence the bill as it
moves through the legislative process to its final, eviscerated form.

The claim that the proposed legislation would ban inhumane methods of
“euthanasia” is totally false. Spent hens are just piles of garbage – a
costly nuisance – to egg producers, to be gotten rid of any old way. Like
the male chicks of the egg industry who are trashed as soon as they are
born, their sisters are a waste product to this industry as soon as they lay
fewer eggs. Gassing hens to death with CO2 in metal boxes is NOT EUTHANASIA!

What Should I Do?

United Poultry Concerns opposes the Egg Products Inspection Act
Amendments. We oppose legislation that benefits egg producers and legally
condemns hens to living in cages. With Congress set to consider the Farm
Bill shortly, please notify your U.S. Senators and Representatives that you
oppose the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments. Call them at (202)
224-3121. Urge them to oppose this legislation and briefly and clearly
explain your reason.

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